Has the free-to-play bubble burst?

Richard Bartle isn't alone in thinking the free-to-play bubble is soon to burst. Talking at this week's Develop Conference in Brighton, UK, three mobile game designers with an expertise in free-to-play discussed the negative direction that F2P titles are headed and why that may be coming to an end.

"I would rather have 10,000 people who play my game for two years, than a million people who only play for a short time," Matthew Wiggins of mobile studio Jiggery Pokery states. The discussion, as reported by Gamasutra, focused on the unsavory practices of quick in-and-out publishers who were only out to make gobs of cash as quickly as possible.

But one industry vet thinks that the F2P bubble has burst. "I think we're moving away from the aggressive initial monetization," CSR Racing studio boss Jason Avent says. "Those people who love your game are happy to pay for it. It's getting people into that longer game... We need to move away from exploiting a small number of people, and instead work to make lots of people stick around."